2. Stupefy your reader. Bring your knowledge to bear in such a way as to make readers feel small, inexperienced, poorly read and uncouth. This can be accomplished by: a) Making frequent references to Greek literature, which you must familiarize yourself with for this express purpose. Don't allow its irrelevance to trouble you. You need only drop a name or two into a roughly suitable context. Extra points for the mention of Orpheus or Oedipus and for placing any ancient Greek personage into paradoxically modern situations or predicaments. b) As above, you may also salt your verse with Latin, or even better, French and French streets (Rue de's), so long as you do so in a manner that leaves non-Latin/French speakers embarrassed for their failure to learn extinct or superfluous languages.

3. Borrow inspiration. If you find yourself lacking in original ideas, choose another person's art, and then describe it. This technique is most effective if the original artist is European, dead, and esteemed somewhere between van Gogh and total obscurity, but never one or the other. The genius of this strategy is that you require no genius of your own; simply highlight the finer points of a painting, poem, museum, etc., bridge it to your own life with a metaphor, and in the final lines propose a transformation of self that exists as possibility but falls utterly short with the last word. The important thing is that you express yourself. No matter that you have little to say.

4. Exploit your tragedies. This is a must. If you have not done so already, begin by removing all allusions to joy, positivity, and wholesome satisfaction with life, for a proper postmodern writer must employ the whole of her misery, enlarging upon it with ink and page so that others may join hands in despair. Next, scroll through the misfortunes of your life. They are yours, and exist for the sole purpose of dramatization. If you have endured a divorce, a miscarriage, held a parent's hand on their deathbed, by God, it is your solemn responsibility to decorate these moments and publish them at the world, for how else will we share in your agony?

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